The New York Times, September 19, 2019
The skies are emptying out.
The number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29 percent since 1970, scientists reported on Thursday. There are 2.9 billion fewer birds taking wing now than there were 50 years ago.
The analysis, published in the journal Science, is the most exhaustive and ambitious attempt yet to learn what is happening to avian populations. The results have shocked researchers and conservation organizations.
Greetings! I wanted to get this update out in time to let folks in Washington DC know that I’ll be speaking about She Has Her Mother’s Laugh at the Smithsonian Institute on Tuesday. I’ll be in conversation with Kirk Johnson, the director of the National Museum of Natural History. Please join us! Details can be found here.
Here are a few things I wrote for the New York Times since my last newsletter:
“Scientists Find the Skull of Humanity’s Ancestor, on a Computer “
“Why Aren’t Cancer Drugs Better? The Targets Might Be Wrong”
“Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves? “
September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.”
October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books.
October 16, 2019 Boston, MA. Allen Frontiers Symposium. Keynote address.
October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF–in conversation with author Annalee Newitz.
October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium.
November 9, 2019 Charleston, SC. Charleston To Charleston Literary Festival
December 3, 2019 Nashville. Vanderbilt University. Chancellor Lecture Series.
My latest book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.
You can find information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published September 15, 2019. Copyright 2019 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, September 11, 2019
Twenty years ago, the fight against cancer seemed as if it were about to take a dramatic turn.
Traditionally, cancer doctors fought the disease with crude weapons, often simply poisoning fast-growing cells whether they were cancerous or healthy. But then a team of researchers hit on a new strategy: drugs targeting proteins produced by cancer cells that seemed necessary to their survival.
One such drug, Gleevec, worked spectacularly in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia. But the clinical trials that followed mostly have produced disappointments.
Continue reading “Why Aren’t Cancer Drugs Better? The Targets Might Be Wrong”
The New York Times, September 10, 2019
A single new fossil can change the way we think about human origins, but discovering it — deep in a cave or buried in rock — remains a daunting struggle for hammer-wielding paleoanthropologists.
“It can take years and luck to find the right one,” said Aurélien Mounier, a paleoanthropologist at the French National Museum of Natural History.
Now researchers like Dr. Mounier are using computers and mathematical techniques to reconstruct the appearance of fossils they have yet to find.
Continue reading “Scientists Find the Skull of Humanity’s Ancestor, on a Computer”
The New York Times, August 29, 2019
SAN DIEGO — Two hundred and fifty miles over Alysson Muotri’s head, a thousand tiny spheres of brain cells were sailing through space.
The clusters, called brain organoids, had been grown a few weeks earlier in the biologist’s lab here at the University of California, San Diego. He and his colleagues altered human skin cells into stem cells, then coaxed them to develop as brain cells do in an embryo.
The organoids grew into balls about the size of a pinhead, each containing hundreds of thousands of cells in a variety of types, each type producing the same chemicals and electrical signals as those cells do in our own brains.
Continue reading “Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves?”